Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  I was in a library and the library was on fire. I grabbed books at random off the shelves, stuffing them underarm. Had to save what I could, as many as I could. Down a corridor towards me strolled James Joyce, tip of a handsome malacca cane tapping the floor in front of him, shoes buffed to a high polish but severely down at the heels, eyes huge behind glasses. “Is there, sir, a problem?” The elevator door opened. Borges stood inside. His useless, boiled-egg eyes swept over me. He wore a well-appointed three-piece pinstripe suit, one black shoe, one brown. “Milton,” he said, “has anyone seen John Milton? He was just here. We were talking.” I scuttled towards the stairway, books spilling from my arms….

  Whereupon the library’s fire alarm there in that fanciful land became my telephone here in this unregenerate one.

  And whereupon, when my arm appeared to ignore the message sent it-simple enough directions, after all: reach out, pick up the phone-I panicked. I knew this lag, this recalcitrance. I’d had another stroke, and a worse one this time, no doubt about it. What should be currents pulsing down the wires of nerves had become a spray of welder’s sparks. Everything got worse. Always. The world’s single immutable law.

  But in fact the arm had only fallen asleep. Seconds later (though at the time it seemed far longer) the arm responded. I watched as, pins and needles firing along its length, it followed through. Found the phone, fetched it to me. Still felt as though my shoulder had two or three pounds of dead meat strapped to it. Then tongue and palate repeated the misfire.

  “Lew?” Deborah said in response to my gaugh?

  I tried again, coming up with, approximately, Yeg-guh.

  “Lew, are you all right?” Alarm in her voice now.

  Swallowing, clearing my throat. Trying out a few vowels and diphthongs offstage, then swinging the mouthpiece back towards me. Humming, I remembered reading somewhere, humming was supposed to relax your vocal cords.

  “Lew, what are you doing? What the hell is that?”

  “Humming.”

  “Humming. As in bird.”

  “Right: humming pigeon. Humming relaxes the vocal cords. Like doing warm-ups, stretches.”

  “But you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. Sorry. It’s been a tough day. I was flat out, dreamless.” No way I’d tell her just how tough it had been, or why. “What time is it?”

  Silence on the line. Finally: “We’ve been together what, four or five years now, Lew?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You have any idea how often, in all those years, you asked me the time?”

  “No.”

  “Never. Not once. Clocks, dates, time of day, none of that ever had much to do with the way you live your life.”

  Which, upon reflection, was probably true, and I had to wonder, as she did, why now such things should matter. Hand meanwhile had distinguished itself from phone and begun its climb back up the phylogenetic slope. Switching the phone to the other, I shook the left heartily, worked it as though pumping the bulb of a sphygmomanometer that (I had little doubt) would reveal a dramatically elevated blood pressure. Like many things in life, alcohol for instance, relationships, or writing books, the meds had worked for a while, then stopped working.

  “Still at rehearsal?”

  “Not really-though there’s a chance we might go back. That’s why I’m calling.” She waited and, when I said no more, went on. “You sure you’re okay, I don’t need to come home?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay.”

  Crackles and pops in the wire.

  “Things haven’t been going too well for us lately. That’s not exactly news, I guess. A lot of it’s my fault. I wanted so badly to find some way off the track. And now I’ve been so immersed in getting the play done. When I have coffee, whether or not I eat or sleep, deliveries at the store, sales there, regular hours-none of that seems to matter much anymore. I used to feel like this a lot, Lew. All the time. I wasn’t sure I ever would again.”

  More crackles and pops. Light from outside fell through the window, pushing a slab of brightness into place on floor and wall, darkening the rest of the room.

  “Never easy, is it?” I said.

  “No reason it should be.”

  We stood poised on parallel wires, balance poles like cats’ whiskers out at our sides.

  “You have somewhere to stay?”

  “Temporarily…. I’m sorry, Lew.”

  “Me too.”

  “I love you, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  I hung up the phone. From nowhere Bat appeared, leaping onto the nightstand. He sat there, eyes fixed upon me, purring, then collapsed, paws hooked over the edge. Telling me another life was there alongside my own, that I wasn’t alone after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Thank you for coming. Can Mrs. Molino get you anything? Coffee? Something to eat, perhaps. A sandwich? We’ve just received a fine Virginia ham-shipped in from North Carolina, not Virginia, as it happens. Or since we’re well along in the afternoon, perhaps a single malt. Some years ago you had, as I remember, a taste for Scotch.”

  “Taste had little to do with it.”

  “So I understood at the time.”

  My eyes were on Catherine Molino, standing near the door through which I’d entered. What looked to be an original Ingres floated above her left shoulder, a framed Picasso drawing, four abrupt lines coming together in the most improbable manner, at her right. Black, Oriental-looking hair gathered in a clip at the base of a swanlike neck. Designer jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with sleeves rolled, tails out, handmade brocade vest over.

  “I’m good, thank you.”

  Mrs. Molino smiled, nodded once and withdrew. Smile, nod and withdrawal all equally engaging.

  “Alouette, I take it, proved otherwise occupied and unable to accompany you?”

  “I saw no reason to ask-as I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course.”

  Looking far too small for it, Guidry sat in an antique highback wheelchair, as though the chair with time might be diminishing him, gaining by increments some stature drained from him. The room was warm enough to have orchids sprouting from cracks in the walls; nonetheless a blanket covered lap and legs.

  “An old man’s blood goes thin,” he said as I took off my coat, “turns from wine to water,” and hung the coat across the back of my chair.

  Here, we were well apart from the world I watched go on about its business outside the window. Everything in the room, carpet, curtains, walls, blanket, was blue-green, and all of it seemed slightly out of focus, fluid, shimmering. Here we moved at a much slower pace than those out there in that other world.

  I’m underwater. This room’s an aquarium.

  “Once again, Mr. Griffin, I thank you for coming. You had little enough reason or inclination to do so.”

  “True.”

  “So why have you come?”

  “To be quite honest, Dr. Guidry-”

  “Horace. Please.”

  “-I’m not sure. I’ve nothing to offer. Nor is there anything I want from you.”

  “Of course.”

  We sat quietly a moment. Half a block away, girls in plaid skirts and white shirts with pocket crests pumped swings higher and higher while young men in charcoal slacks and white shirts with clip-on ties shot baskets. All of this soundless outside the aquarium walls.

  Turn off sound and even the most familiar scenes, the commonest human gestures, turn strange on you. Not to mention what strange lives these were to me in the first place, how impenetrable. Nothing whatsoever to do with my own. I might as well be watching lobster or rays in their tanks. Ant farms. Beehives.

  “Just felt I should be here, I guess.”

  “Intuition. Much of your life has been shaped by it.”

  “What shape there’s been, yes.”

  “And not always to your benefit.”

  That, too, I had to concede.

  “Still you persist.�
�

  I shrugged. “As good a guide as any other, finally.”

  “Anything can save you if you grab it hard enough, and hold on.” He smiled. “You’re surprised that I’ve read your books.”

  “I’m surprised anybody’s read them. Surprised they were ever written, for that matter.”

  “But surely you must realize their attraction. How they take up the common textures of our lives-”

  “And just what do you think might be common in the textures of our lives, Doctor Guidry?”

  He paused. “You’re right, of course. A presumption on my part. Forgive me. Nonetheless, taking the books’ own high ground-scrambling for their shelter, if you like-I have to tell you I found them fascinating. Those first sentences drew me in. I was there. Oil pumps shushing Lew as he stands waiting to kill a man, water oak splitting open like a book in the storm. Lew himself shot, coming half-to there in the emergency room.”

  “Parent searching for a lost child.”

  “Yes.”

  Hands emerged from beneath the blanket and found their way to wheels, swiveling the chair to see what it was I watched over his shoulder. Wrists looked frozen, immobile, knots of bone protruding like cypress roots, fingers swollen and red as sausages. “Young people…. We should never let ourselves get too far away from them.” Then, swiveling the chair back around: “It’s not just another Catholic school, you know-despite the uniforms. Private, yes. But there’s no church affiliation. None. Other parts of the nation, they call it a magnet school. Culling the most talented, most promising students from all the city’s schools, small and large and in between, bringing them together here. I’m privileged to contribute.”

  Bending, he plucked a catheter bag from the side of the wheelchair, snapped his finger against the valve at the top, waited a moment, then snapped again. Bright gold fluid flowed into the bag in a gush. He let go of the bag and it swung there at the end of its rubbery placenta, back and forth.

  “I know about David, of course.”

  I nodded.

  “Recently I called to ask if you’d consider finding someone for me.”

  “And I declined.”

  “You did, yes. And it’s a capacity in which I require you no longer.”

  One hand snaked out again from beneath the blanket. A crooked finger hovered. Was I to follow knuckle, first joint, or tip? Each pointed in a different direction.

  “There’s a folder on the desk, at the corner there. Perhaps you’d be so good as to retrieve it?”

  I did so.

  “Therein are copies of letters I’ve received. They may prove of interest.”

  Opening the folder, I read the top page and the one under, then shuffled through the rest, perhaps a dozen of them. Each began with some variation of history asserting itself. Memory transports us … In those years … Experience shows that … Those who have no knowledge of history are doomed to repeat it. Santayana I took as a bad sign. This went on, soon enough we’d be getting Shakespeare and Ross Macdonald, quotes from Tocqueville manhandled like soft clay into shapes their author never intended.

  “I can keep these?”

  He nodded. The nod was easier than pulling out of it. Gravity and time are toll bridges, fares keep going up.

  “You know who sent them.”

  He started to say more but stopped himself.

  “No.”

  “A moment ago you spoke as though you did.”

  His eyes went from the wall where they’d wandered, back to me. They were amazingly clear. “At first …” Blue springwater tumbling over white stone. “But what I thought then, upon first seeing them, I know can’t possibly be true. You’ve had a chance to look them over now, Mr. Griffin. What do they suggest to you?” His head dipped an eighth of an inch.

  “Aside from the fact that you’re withholding information, you mean.”

  One diffident hand made its way to the surface, floated there a moment with fingers together like logs in a raft-confirming? allaying? — then subsided. Guidry’s chin followed the hand down to sink onto his chest, bisecting the curve. He snored.

  I eased from the chair and made my way into the outer room. Guidry’s home had been built around the turn of the century as Europeans began taking over the city and crept by degrees uptown, putting up ever more magnificent homes in rivalry to those of downtown Creoles. At one point, like many others, the home had been transformed, to a hotel in this case, but unlike others suffered few structural modifications. This outer room, originally intended as parlor or sitting room, in its hotel period a lobby, had remained much the same through all the home’s avatars.

  Mrs. Molino rose from behind an elegant antique desk that put one in mind of stilt-legged birds.

  “He’s asleep,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “For much of the day. And careening about the past the remainder. There’s not a lot left to him. Or of him. We always think of the elderly as increasingly needy, but it’s quite the opposite, really. Their lives get simpler-attain a kind of purity. There’s little enough now that I can do for the doctor. I manage his affairs, offer what comfort I can. Just as you’ve done. Thank you again for coming.”

  “I’m not sure why I did, or, for that matter, what good it may have done. But you’re welcome.”

  “Mr. Griffin?” she said behind me.

  I turned.

  “He’s concerned over the letters, isn’t he? The messages Alouette has been receiving.”

  “Should he be?”

  She stepped briskly across the room to stand close. Tall and slender, man’s oversize white dress shirt billowing out in the breeze of her passage, making me remember the first time I saw Deborah there beside the counter in her shop and thought willowy, as I’d done so often since. No sign of internal struggle in her eyes.

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  I could smell the shampoo she’d used that morning, apples and pears, a quiet tide of garlic, olive and lemon on her breath. Massively unsure of myself and long out of practice, signals a blur, I asked if she might consider having dinner with me. Or just coffee, if she’d be more comfortable with that.

  I’ve embarrassed her, I thought at first; then, as she regained composure, recognized her reaction for what it was: some essential core of shyness overcome but unvanquished. Her eyes met mine.

  “Understand that it’s terribly difficult for me to get away …”

  I nodded.

  “But yes. Yes, I’d like that very much, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Good.”

  “You have my number. Please call. We’ll arrange something.”

  Touching her lightly on the upper arm, I took my leave.

  From a phone in a K amp;B just down the street I dialed her number. New-fashioned teenagers sat with piercings and bleached hair behind old-fashioned stemmed glasses of cherry phosphate and malted milk at the lunch counter. A hunched, rickety man pushed himself erect before the display of condoms, natural vitamins and copper bracelets to brace the harried pharmacist over conflicting needs and insurance plan, his wheelchair’s E-cylinder of oxygen a silent witness.

  “Mr. Griffin calling about those arrangements,” I said, “could you please hold?”

  She laughed. “Certainly. This is a bit earlier than I’d expected to hear from him. Will you tell Mr. Griffin that?”

  “I will indeed. Anything else I should tell him?”

  “Well … There’s a good chance I’d be ready by seven, if he happened by. And a fair chance, too, that reservations might be waiting for us at Commander’s.”

  “Seven. Commander’s. Got it. And who is this again?”

  The connection went. She would have set the phone gently in its cradle. Smiling.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Morning’s his best time, Catherine Molino said of Guidry. And my worst.

  That particular morning, after returning to the house, drinking a pot of coffee and reading deeply into Rimbaud, I pulled my detective out of the box in which he�
�d rested peacefully for years, propped him up and set him to work, writing in his guise, there at the kitchen table as I looked past sink and sill and recalled a stream of cheap apartments:

  My room looks out on a garden. There are enormous trees beneath my narrow window. At three in the morning, the candlelight grows dim and all the birds start singing at once in the trees. No more work. I gaze at trees and sky, transfixed by that inexpressible first hour of morning. I can see the school dormitories, completely silent. And already I hear the delicious, resonant, clattering sound of carts on the boulevards.

  I have another drink and spit on the roof-tiles-because my room is a garret. Soon I’ll go down to buy bread. It’s that time of day. Workers are up and about all over the place. I’ll have a drink or two at the corner bar, come back to eat my bread and leftovers, be in bed by seven, when the sun brings woodlice out from under the roof-tiles.

  Early mornings in summer and December evenings-these are what I remember, what I love most about this place I find myself.

  I paused, changed the period to a comma, and added:

  this place where I’ve fallen to earth anew.

  Just what had prompted me to carry this away from my reading of Rimbaud? Why, of all things, candles? And, given that my books were set in New Orleans, surely the woodlice should be roaches-of the hearty species that, as one local friend notes with more than a touch of pride, rock you back on your heel when you step on them? But something had caught, and this wouldn’t be like other times I’d sat at the table scribbling. These pages wouldn’t go onto the heap of bills, junk mail and newspapers on the shelf by the table, by the Mason jar stuffed full of corks from wine bottles and the mug with its stub of a handle like a broken tooth and its cargo of buttons, paper clips, corroded copper pennies, dimes worn smooth. These pages would be, as they grew, my last book, a return to where it all started.

  When the phone rang, levering me back into this world, I looked up in surprise. The clock on the stove read 1:13. Had I always known it was there? Small engines go on ticking everywhere about us.

  Four calls all told, that afternoon.